editorNPR Digital Services RSS Generator 0.94Geoff Nunberg is the linguist contributor on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross.He teaches at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley and is the author of The Way We Talk Now, Going Nucular, Talking Right and The Years of Talking Dangerously. His most recent book is Ascent of the A-Word. His website is www.geoffreynunberg.com.NPR Digital Services RSS Generator 0.94Geoff NunbergWed, 26 Oct 2016 07:07:47 +0000Geoff Nunberghttp://wkar.org
Geoff NunbergIt has become a familiar story in a world bristling with live mics. A public figure is caught out using a vulgarity, and the media have to decide how to report the remark. Web media tend to be explicit, but the traditional media are more circumspect.Take the vulgar epithet that George W. Bush was overheard using to describe a New York Times reporter during the 2000 presidential campaign. Some newspapers printed it with dashes or asterisks. Others said it was a word that rhymed with "casserole" or "glass bowl." And The New York Times itself described the word as an obscenity, which made it sound worse than it was.It's easy to ridicule that coyness. Concealing the letters of a word with asterisks is the orthographic equivalent of covering them with pasties and a G-string --they manage to make it look both less shocking and more salacious.Anyway, whom exactly do editors imagine they're protecting? Some of them plead the familiar defense of "not in front of the children." The editors ofNot Fit To Print? When Politicians Talk Dirty, Media Scramble To Sanitizehttp://wkar.org/post/not-fit-print-when-politicians-talk-dirty-media-scramble-sanitize
93292 as http://wkar.orgTue, 25 Oct 2016 18:01:00 +0000Not Fit To Print? When Politicians Talk Dirty, Media Scramble To SanitizeGeoff NunbergWherever you look, this is the year of white working-class males — or, as Donald Trump describes them, "the smart, smart, smart people that don't have the big education." Who are they, and why are they sticking with Trump even as other voters are peeling away?Sociologists talk about the disaffected white underclass. Marxists talk about the lumpenproletariat, or riffraff, which makes "Trumpenproletariat" almost irresistible. But others on both the left and right have used more familiar epithets. A columnist in the New York Daily News calls Trump's supporters "bigots, bumpkins and rednecks." The New York Post calls them the "hillbilly class" and "white trash Americans."Back in 1989, the historian C. Vann Woodward said that "redneck" is the only epithet for an ethnic minority that's still permitted in polite company. He could have said the same thing about "hillbilly" or "white trash."The fact is that Americans don't find class prejudice quite as shameful as racism. College fraternitiesA Resurgence Of 'Redneck' Pride, Marked By Race, Class And Trumphttp://wkar.org/post/resurgence-redneck-pride-marked-race-class-and-trump
91399 as http://wkar.orgTue, 06 Sep 2016 18:27:00 +0000A Resurgence Of 'Redneck' Pride, Marked By Race, Class And TrumpGeoff Nunberg"I am the law-and-order candidate."With that proclamation in his acceptance speech, Donald Trump made it official that he'd be recycling the themes and language of Richard Nixon's 1968 campaign. A lot of observers were quick to point out that 2016 is no 1968 and that Donald Trump is no Richard Nixon. As it happens, "law and order" isn't what it once was, either."Law and order" is an archaic expression, from the Latin "lex et ordo." Over the course of American history, it's the cry that the people in charge have raised to confront the threat of violence bubbling up from below — whether as popular insurrections, public disorders, radical agitators or gangs. It was a phrase invoked to condemn the striking auto workers in Flint in 1936 and the demonstrations organized by Martin Luther King in Birmingham in 1963.But for most Americans of the Nixon era, "law and order" was saturated with the mythology of the Old West. Hollywood made at least five Western films with that very title, most withIs Trump's Call For 'Law And Order' A Coded Racial Message?http://wkar.org/post/trumps-call-law-and-order-coded-racial-message
89746 as http://wkar.orgThu, 28 Jul 2016 19:21:00 +0000Is Trump's Call For 'Law And Order' A Coded Racial Message?Geoff Nunberg"The way kids speak today, I'm here to tell you." Over the course of history, every aging generation has made that complaint, and it has always turned out to be overblown. That's just as well. If the language really had been deteriorating all this time, we'd all be grunting like bears by now.But when it comes to language, history is bunk. Or anyway, it hasn't deterred critics from monitoring the speech of today's young people for the signs of cultural decline.In fact it was a professor of history named Molly Worthen who raised an alarm in The New York Times recently about the way millennials start their sentences with "I feel like," as in, "I feel like the media should concentrate more on the issues."That expression may sound merely diffident, Worthen says, but its real purpose is to avoid confrontation by turning every statement into a feeling that halts an argument in its tracks — how can you say that my experience isn't valid? In the end, she says, "I feel like" makes logicalIrked By The Way Millennials Speak? 'I Feel Like' It's Time To Loosen Uphttp://wkar.org/post/irked-way-millennials-speak-i-feel-its-time-loosen
86941 as http://wkar.orgTue, 24 May 2016 18:26:00 +0000Irked By The Way Millennials Speak? 'I Feel Like' It's Time To Loosen UpGeoff NunbergThe French have gotten themselves into one of their recurrent linguistic lathers, this one over the changes in their spelling that will be taking effect in the fall. The changes were originally proposed more than 25 years ago. But nothing much came of them until the government recently announced that they'd be incorporated in the new textbooks, at which point traditionalists took to the barricades.The government has made a point of calling the changes "rectifications" rather than reforms, and on the whole they're pretty minor. A few words like "le week-end" and "le strip-tease" will lose their hyphens. The word for onion, "oignon," will have to give up its silent i.But what people have gotten most worked up about is the elimination of many of the circumflexes. That's the pointy little hat that sits on top of vowels in words like "hôtel" and "tête-à-tête," marking the spot where a letter was lost sometime in the past.The changes are supposed to make the written language easier to learn,Changes To French Spelling Make Us Wonder: Why Is English So Weird?http://wkar.org/post/changes-french-spelling-make-us-wonder-why-english-so-weird
83012 as http://wkar.orgWed, 24 Feb 2016 19:12:00 +0000Changes To French Spelling Make Us Wonder: Why Is English So Weird?Geoff NunbergTalk about belated recognition. At its meeting in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 7, the American Dialect Society voted to make the 600-year-old pronoun "they" their word of the year for 2015. Or more precisely, a particular use of that pronoun that grammarians call the singular "they." This is the "they" that doesn't care whether it's referring to a male or female. As in "If I get a call, tell them they can call me back." Or "Did someone leave their books here?"As ordinary as it is, that use of "they" has always been a bit disreputable — you might say it, but you wouldn't want to write it down. But now it's a pronoun whose hour has come.A few months ago, the Washington Post style guide accepted it. And it's been welcomed by people who identify as genderqueer and who feel that "he" and "she" don't necessarily exhaust all the gender possibilities. Universities allow students to select it as their personal pronoun. And so does Facebook, so that your friends will get notices like "Wish them aEveryone Uses Singular 'They,' Whether They Realize It Or Nothttp://wkar.org/post/everyone-uses-singular-they-whether-they-realize-it-or-not
81146 as http://wkar.orgWed, 13 Jan 2016 18:00:00 +0000Everyone Uses Singular 'They,' Whether They Realize It Or NotGeoff NunbergThe obvious candidates for word of the year are the labels of the year's big stories — new words like "microaggression" or resurgent ones like "refugees." But sometimes a big theme is captured in more subtle ways. So for my word of the year, I offer you the revival of "gig" as the name for a new economic order. It's the last chapter in the life of a little word that has tracked the rise and fall of the great American job."Gig" goes back more than a century as musicians' slang for a date or engagement. Nobody's sure where it originally came from, though there are lots of imaginative theories out there. But the word didn't have any particular glamour until the 1950s, when the hipsters and the Beats adapted it to mean any job you took to keep body and soul together while your real life was elsewhere.The earliest example of that usage of the word that I've found is from a 1952 piece by Jack Kerouac, talking about his gig as a part-time brakeman for the Southern Pacific railroad in San JoseGoodbye Jobs, Hello 'Gigs': How One Word Sums Up A New Economic Realityhttp://wkar.org/post/goodbye-jobs-hello-gigs-nunbergs-word-year-sums-new-economic-reality
81057 as http://wkar.orgMon, 11 Jan 2016 18:32:00 +0000Goodbye Jobs, Hello 'Gigs': How One Word Sums Up A New Economic RealityGeoff NunbergTo listen to the media tell it, "so" is busting out all over — or at least at the beginning of a sentence. New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas calls "so" the new "um" and "like"; others call it a plague and a fad.It's like a lot of other grammatical fixations: Not everybody cares about it, but the ones who do care care a whole lot. When NPR's Weekend Edition asked listeners last year to pick the most-misused word or phrase in the language, that sentence-initial "so" came in in second place, right behind "between you and I" and ahead of venerable bugbears like misusing "literally" and confusing "who" and "whom." That's a meteoric rise for a peeve that wasn't even on the radar a decade ago.NPR itself has been singled out for overuse of "so" by both interviewees and hosts. That prompted the NPR head of standards and practices to calculate how many times the hosts and reporters on the major NPR news programs had started sentences with "so" in a single week in August of 2014. WhenSo, What's The Big Deal With Starting A Sentence With 'So'? http://wkar.org/post/so-whats-big-deal-starting-sentence-so
75327 as http://wkar.orgThu, 03 Sep 2015 17:35:00 +0000So, What's The Big Deal With Starting A Sentence With 'So'? Geoff Nunberg"I tell it like it is." Chris Christie made this his campaign slogan. Donald Trump repeats it whenever he's challenged on something he has said. And Scott Walker, Rick Perry, Mike Huckabee, John Kasich and Rick Santorum have said the same thing. It's the conventional pledge of candor, or what passes for it in American public life.It's actually odd that anybody's still using the phrase. By rights it should have gone the way of dated '60s slang like "right on" and "can you dig it?" Like those expressions, "tell it like it is" had its roots in black speech in the 1940s and 1950s. Back then it just meant to come clean about something. In 1954, the RTracing The Origin Of The Campaign Promise To 'Tell It Like It Is' http://wkar.org/post/tracing-origin-campaign-promise-tell-it-it
73188 as http://wkar.orgWed, 15 Jul 2015 19:36:00 +0000Tracing The Origin Of The Campaign Promise To 'Tell It Like It Is' Geoff NunbergWe English-speakers take a perverse pride in the orneriness of our spelling, which is one reason why the spelling bee has been a popular entertainment since the 19th century. It's fun watching schoolchildren getting difficult words right. It can be even more entertaining to watch literate adults getting them wrong. I've seen that first-hand when I served as the judge for a spelling bee for San Francisco-area writers that's held as an annual benefit for a Berkeley literary clearinghouse called Small Press Distribution.It's just as well that my status as a linguist precludes my being a contestant, since I'd probably go down on the first round. The only reason I've been able to keep my deficiencies as a speller under wraps is that now I have technology to intercede between me and my readers. Not a month goes by that spellcheck doesn't remind me that "resistant" has an a in it or that "temperamental" has two. I do usually get the middle vowel of "separate" right, but only because I stillWhat's A Thamakau? Spelling Bee Is More About Entertainment Than Englishhttp://wkar.org/post/whats-thamakau-spelling-bee-more-about-entertainment-english
71631 as http://wkar.orgThu, 11 Jun 2015 17:03:00 +0000What's A Thamakau? Spelling Bee Is More About Entertainment Than EnglishGeoff NunbergHBO's Silicon Valley is back, with its pitch-perfect renderings of the culture and language of the tech world — like at the opening of the "Disrupt" startup competition run by the Tech Crunch website at the end of last season. "We're making the world a better place through scalable fault-tolerant distributed databases" — the show's writers didn't have to exercise their imagination much to come up with those little arias of geeky self-puffery, or with the name Disrupt, which, as it happens, is what the Tech Crunch conferences are actually called. As is most everything else these days. "Disrupt" and "disruptive" are ubiquitous in the names of conferences, websites, business school degree programs and business book best-sellers. The words pop up in more than 500 TED Talks: "How to Avoid Disruption in Business and in Life," "Embracing Disruption," "Disrupting Higher Education," "Disrupt Yourself." It transcends being a mere buzzword. As the philosopher Jeremy Bentham said two centuries agoFrom TED Talks To Taco Bell, Abuzz With Silicon Valley-Style 'Disruption'http://wkar.org/post/ted-talks-taco-bell-abuzz-silicon-valley-style-disruption
69618 as http://wkar.orgMon, 27 Apr 2015 17:20:00 +0000From TED Talks To Taco Bell, Abuzz With Silicon Valley-Style 'Disruption'Geoff NunbergI think of English usage as one of those subjects like cocktails or the British royal family. A lot of people take a passing interest in it but you never know who's going to turn out to be a true believer — the kind of person who complains about the grammar errors on restaurant menus. "Waiter, there's a split infinitive in my soup!"For single-minded devotion to grammatical rectitude, you'd be hard-pressed to match a Wikipedia editor named Bryan Henderson, who goes by the user name of Giraffedata. He was the subject of a piece by Andrew McMillan on the long-form site Medium that provoked a lot of debate. Giraffedata has a single bee in his bonnet, the phrase "comprised of." He has written a 6,000-word essay on his Wikipedia user page explaining why he thinks it's an egregious error. And to drive home his point, he has made 47,000 edits over the last eight years, most of them aimed at purging the phrase wherever it occurs on the Wikipedia site. He doesn't show it any mercy even when itDon't You Dare Use 'Comprised Of' On Wikipedia: One Editor Will Take It Outhttp://wkar.org/post/dont-you-dare-use-comprised-wikipedia-one-editor-will-take-it-out
67495 as http://wkar.orgThu, 12 Mar 2015 19:39:00 +0000Don't You Dare Use 'Comprised Of' On Wikipedia: One Editor Will Take It OutGeoff Nunberg"Infobesity," "lumbersexual," "phablet." As usual, the items that stand out as candidates for word of the year are like its biggest pop songs, catchy but ephemeral. But even a fleeting expression can sometimes encapsulate the zeitgeist. That's why I'm nominating "God view" for the honor.It's the term that the car service company Uber uses for a map view that shows the locations of all the Uber cars in an area and silhouettes of the people who ordered them. The media seized on the term this fall when it came out that the company had been entertaining itself and its guests by pairing that view with its customer data so it could display the movements of journalists and VIP customers as they made their way around New York.Those reports came on top of earlier criticisms of Uber for taking a prurient interest in its customers' movements. Not long before, an Uber data scientist had blogged about tracking what he called "rides of glory." Those were the customers who booked rides late onFeeling Watched? 'God View' Is Geoff Nunberg's Word Of The Yearhttp://wkar.org/post/feeling-watched-god-view-geoff-nunbergs-word-year
63269 as http://wkar.orgWed, 10 Dec 2014 20:01:00 +0000Feeling Watched? 'God View' Is Geoff Nunberg's Word Of The YearGeoff NunbergTo judge from some of the headlines, it was a very big deal. At an event held at the Royal Society in London, for the first time ever, a computer passed the Turing Test, which is widely taken as the benchmark for saying a machine is engaging in intelligent thought. But like the other much-hyped triumphs of artificial intelligence, this one wasn't quite what it appeared. Computers can do things that seem quintessentially human, but they usually take a different path to get there. IBM's Deep Blue mastered chess not by refining its intuitions but by evaluating hundreds of millions of positions per second. Watson won at Jeopardy not by wide reading but by swallowing all of Wikipedia in a single gulp. And as the software that reportedly beat the Turing Test showed, computers don't even go about making small talk the same way we do.The Turing Test takes its name from a 1950 paper by Alan Turing, the British mathematician who laid out the foundations of modern computer science. Turing hadDo Feelings Compute? If Not, The Turing Test Doesn't Mean Muchhttp://wkar.org/post/do-feelings-compute-if-not-turing-test-doesnt-mean-much
56061 as http://wkar.orgTue, 01 Jul 2014 19:46:00 +0000Do Feelings Compute? If Not, The Turing Test Doesn't Mean MuchGeoff NunbergA lot of things had to come together to turn Thomas Piketty's controversial Capital in the Twenty-First Century into the tome of the season. There's its timeliness, its surprising accessibility and the audacity of its thesis, that capitalism inevitably leads to greater concentrations of wealth at the very top. There's the mass of data he musters, which has been the subject of animated debate (see here and here) among economists.And then there's the title. Capital in the Twenty-First Century evokes another famous tome with "capital" in its title, and makes comparisons inevitable. The title is a red flag for the right, in every sense of the term. A Frenchman who alludes to Marx and advocates a global wealth tax to reduce inequality; it's like shooting poissons in a barrel. And while liberals don't find the book particularly Marxist in its theory or predictions, they see it as Marxian sweep in its ambition and its ideas.But there's a linguistic link, too. For all their differences,150 Years After Marx, 'Capital' Still Can't Shake Loose Of 'Das Kapital'http://wkar.org/post/150-years-after-marx-capital-still-cant-shake-loose-das-kapital
54313 as http://wkar.orgTue, 27 May 2014 18:54:00 +0000150 Years After Marx, 'Capital' Still Can't Shake Loose Of 'Das Kapital'Geoff Nunberg"There goes the neighborhood." Every so often that cry goes up in San Francisco, announcing a new chapter in American cultural history, as the rest of the country looks on. There were the beats in North Beach, then the hippies in the Haight, then the gays in the Castro. Now it's the turn of the techies who are pouring into my own Mission neighborhood, among other places. Only this time around, the green stuff that's perfuming the air is money, not weed.Locals are agitated over soaring rents and the changing urban landscape, as used bookstores yield to cafes full of people punching out business plans on their laptops. But the most heated protests and discussions have focused on the buses that shuttle 18,000 tech workers from San Francisco to their jobs at Google, Apple, Facebook and other companies. People call them all Google buses, because they're hard to tell apart — oversized Wi-Fi-equipped luxury coaches, usually gleaming white, which scoop up their passengers at transit stops likeHackers? Techies? What To Call San Francisco's Newcomershttp://wkar.org/post/hackers-techies-what-call-san-franciscos-newcomers
48060 as http://wkar.orgThu, 16 Jan 2014 18:56:00 +0000Hackers? Techies? What To Call San Francisco's NewcomersGeoff NunbergWhen I took the SATs a very long time ago, it didn't occur to us to cram for the vocabulary questions. Back then, the A in SAT still stood for "aptitude," and most people accepted the wholesome fiction that the tests were measures of raw ability that you couldn't prepare for — "like sticking a dipstick into your brain," one College Board researcher said.It wasn't until the test-prep industry took off a few years later that people realized you could work the system, and students began boning up on the words that were likely to appear on the exam. "SAT words," people called them, with the implication that they existed only to be tested. If you wanted to use a word like "vociferous," you'd add the tag "SAT word" to signal that you weren't showing off.Now the new College Board president, David Coleman, wants to sweep away all those writerly words like "mendacious" and "jettison" that students learn for the exam. They're to be replaced by words like "hypothesis" and "transform" — whatSorry Assiduous (adj.) SAT-Takers, Linguist In Dudgeon (n.) Over Vocab Flashcardshttp://wkar.org/post/sorry-assiduous-adj-sat-takers-linguist-dudgeon-n-over-vocab-flashcards
47096 as http://wkar.orgMon, 23 Dec 2013 19:27:00 +0000Sorry Assiduous (adj.) SAT-Takers, Linguist In Dudgeon (n.) Over Vocab FlashcardsGeoff NunbergI feel a little defensive about choosing "selfie" as my Word of the Year for 2013. I've usually been partial to words that encapsulate one of the year's major stories, such as "occupy" or "big data." Or "privacy," which is the word Dictionary.com chose this year. But others go with what I think of as mayfly words — the ones that bubble briefly to the surface in the wake of some fad or fashion.Over recent years, the people at Oxford Dictionaries have chosen items such as "locavore," "hypermiling," "refudiate" and "unfriend," among others. You'd never know it was a period touched by economic collapse, bitter partisanship, or the growth of the surveillance state. So I wasn't surprised when Oxford announced last month that their choice for the word of the year was "selfie," which beat out "twerk" and "binge-watch." It struck me as a word that wears its ephemerality on its outstretched sleeve — any phenomenon whose most prominent evangelists are Kim, Kourtney, Khloe, Kendall and Kylie, notNarcissistic Or Not, 'Selfie' Is Nunberg's Word Of The Yearhttp://wkar.org/post/narcissistic-or-not-selfie-nunbergs-word-year
46922 as http://wkar.orgThu, 19 Dec 2013 16:26:00 +0000Narcissistic Or Not, 'Selfie' Is Nunberg's Word Of The YearGeoff NunbergEven taken together, the charges didn't seem to amount to that big a deal — just a matter of quoting a few factual statements and a Wikipedia passage without attributing them. But as Rand Paul discovered, the word "plagiarism" can still rouse people to steaming indignation. Samuel Johnson called plagiarism the most reproachful of literary crimes, and the word itself began as the name of a real crime. In Roman law, a plagiarius was someone who abducted a child or a slave — it's from "plaga," the Latin word for a net or a snare. That connection was first drawn by the first-century poet Martial, who accused a rival he called Fidentius of stealing his works to garner undeserved praise. Martial compared Fidentius to a man who wears a toupee, and others have depicted the plagiarist as somebody who "shines in stolen plumes."The offense can be quite straightforward. Joe Biden was forced to withdraw from the 1988 Democratic presidential primaries when he was caught lifting autobiographicalWas Rand Paul's Plagiarism Dishonest Or A Breach Of Good Form?http://wkar.org/post/did-rand-paul-commit-plagiarism-or-just-faux-pas
45187 as http://wkar.orgTue, 12 Nov 2013 18:11:00 +0000Was Rand Paul's Plagiarism Dishonest Or A Breach Of Good Form?Geoff NunbergEvidently it was quite fortuitous. Just a couple of days after MTV's Video Music Awards, Oxford Dictionaries Online released its quarterly list of the new words it was adding. To the delight of the media, there was "twerk" at the top, which gave them still another occasion to link a story to Miley Cyrus' energetic high jinks.And why not add "twerk"? It's definitely a cool word, which worked its way from New Orleans bounce music into the linguistic mainstream on the strength of its expressive phonetics, among other things. It won't linger — the names of dance styles rarely do — but we'll have a historical record of it in the section reserved for forgotten forbidden dances, along with "lambada" and "turkey trot." Now that dictionaries are online, space is unlimited; you're never going to have to ask the outdated words to give up their spots to make room for the new ones coming on.All the dictionaries periodically release a list of their new words, most of them provocatively cute andThe Internet's 'Twerk' Effect Makes Dictionaries Less Completehttp://wkar.org/post/internets-twerk-effect-makes-dictionaries-less-complete
42206 as http://wkar.orgThu, 12 Sep 2013 18:30:00 +0000The Internet's 'Twerk' Effect Makes Dictionaries Less Complete